This invention relates generally to the field of telephony, and more particularly to an apparatus integrating voice recognition, cellular phone technology and telephone headsets.
Presently, a plurality of headset devices are available for use in a typical PBX or telephone system. A variety of such headsets are disclosed in the Hello Direct Catalog, Spring 1997, and in U.S. Pat. No. 4,882,745 to Silver. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,487,102 to Rothschild, Ralph F., et al., a headset interface is disclosed that is connected to the public telephone network at a central office. The system includes automated voice features that alleviates the need for an operator to vocalize greetings and responses to users of the telephone system. This system relies upon standard ground-line based telephony, rather than cellular technology.
Cellular technology has been widely applied to car telephone systems. For example, a standard car mounted cell phone with a keypad on the hand set is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,335,261 to Fujinaka. Dialing a phone number via the keypad is awkward and potentially unsafe while operating a moving vehicle. Even when the portable phone is removed from the vehicle-mounted base, the cell phone mounted keypad still presents the same difficulties to dialing while a person is in motion or in an environment where being visually distracted can be problematic. The cell phone system in the '261 Patent includes a speaker phone feature that frees a driver from having to hold the phone in the car, but this feature only adds marginally to the overall convenience and safety of the device.
Telephone headsets have been proposed for use with cellular systems, such as the system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,191,602 to Regen et al. The headset shown in this patent fails to eliminate many of the problems of using a cellular device. For example, when using the cellular phone in an automobile, the driver is required to be connected to a slave unit containing electronic circuitry that purports to provide a transparent interface between the headset and the existing cell phone. With this system, the headset is directly connected by a cord to the cellular device. Moreover, as with a standard car phone, the user of the headset shown in the '602 Patent is still required to dial using the keypad on the cellular device.
So-called "wearable" cellular phones have been recently promoted. One such compact telephone can be worn as a necklace around the neck. The device described in the article is not useable when being worn. Additionally a conventional extendable antenna is required along with a keypad for dialing. This invention is consistent with the current state of the art devices that require the user to use their hands to operate the device.
In U.S. Pat. 5,042,063 to Sakanishi, a telephone apparatus is disclosed in which a call may be made in response to utterances of a user by speech recognition without manually dialing a telephone number. However, the system still requires some keypad functions in order to communicate, so that is does not permit true hands free operation.